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Biographical details

Peter Franks graduated with first class honours and then a PhD in plant sciences from the Australian National University under the supervision of Professors Graham Farquhar and Ian Cowan. He was a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in plant environmental physiology at James Cook University before joining the University of Sydney as a Senior Lecturer in biosphere-atmosphere interactions. Peter has been awarded two distinguished research fellowships, the Charles Bullard Fellowship at Harvard University and the Brenda Ryman Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, for studies on the interaction and coevolution of plants and climate. He has also held a Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Sheffield and is currently Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Environmental Sciences.

For more than 12 years Peter has been heavily involved in university teaching. He has developed and coordinated several undergraduate degree courses in biology, ecology and environmental physiology, as well as graduate courses in climate change adaptation, and has supervised honours, masters and PhD research students. Enquiries and informal discussions about postgraduate studies in any of the above research areas are always welcome.

Research interests

I integrate geological and biological information to understand how Earth’s climate and vegetation have co-evolved through deep geological time, and to reveal how CO2 forcing will affect both in the future. To unlock the story within the geologic record I use plant fossils, paleoisotopes and physiological theory to model atmospheric CO2 concentration and plant-atmosphere exchanges over the past 400 million years. Models are validated through experimental manipulation of atmospheric CO2 concentration and plant genomes, meta-analyses of archived data, and ice core records. This information is incorporated into land surface models for long-term projections.

Franks, P., Beerling, D. (2009). Maximum leaf conductance driven by CO2 effects on stomatal size and density over geologic time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(25), 10343-10347. [More Information]

Franks, P., Beerling, D. (2009). Maximum leaf conductance driven by CO2 effects on stomatal size and density over geologic time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(25), 10343-10347. [More Information]